Heptadecagon

Baseball season is about to start (Go Phillies! and Go Mudcats!), and when I took a look at the Phils' roster, I noticed that they have three pitchers who are listed at under six feet tall: Antonio Bastardo, Mauricio Robles, and Raul Valdes.  Curiously, all three are left-handed.  We're defining handedness as the hand with which one throws.  Does anyone really care that Antonio Bastardo bats righty?  I'm sure that's not on Charlie Manuel's mind when he calls Bastardo in from the bullpen. This got me thinking: two easily recognized physical traits that are valued in pitchers are (1) height, and (2) left-handedness.  Well, what's their relative value?  Is left-handedness valued over height, or are they more-or-less the same? If being left-handed is more valuable than being tall, then if I were to look at the shortest pitchers in MLB, I'd expect to find more lefties than a random sample.  So, I made a spreadsheet of all the pitchers on the 2013 40-man...

After every baseball game, the players are responsible for cleaning up the field. Especially rookies. I'm a rookie. We sweep out the dugouts. We rake the dirt along the base-paths. We remove the bases and cover the base posts. We cover the pitcher's mound and home plate area with tarps. We are a grounds-keeping machine . During the post-game clean-up (wow, back-to-back hyphenations) our manager, Terrey, had me get a broom and told me to sweep a circle around home plate. This took all of thirty seconds. "Ok, I'm done," I called out to him. "Keep going, around and around," were his directions. So I did. I kept going in a small circle around and around home plate, in the same direction until I felt so dizzy I couldn't walk straight. Finally, Terrey came over to me, shook his head, and said to make the circles bigger each time. "You mean you want a spiral?" I asked. "Terrey, you have to speak geek to me." "Make a spir...

No, it's not what you're thinking (unless perhaps you're an environmental biologist). Testudines have nothing to do with Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, 500 foot home runs, or shriveled things . Opening day for our baseball team was supposed to be Sunday. Sunday was clear and sunny, but not too hot --- a perfect day for baseball. I was getting dressed for the game when the manager called: the game is postponed because there were turtles on the field. It had rained the previous night, and evidently a gaggle, a school, a flock, a herd, a colony, a swarm, a bale of turtles thought the standing water on the field would be a great place to play. A few hours later, Zoe and Talia got the idea into their heads that the turtles were having their own baseball game. One of them said that the game was probably only in the second inning, turtles being very slow creatures and all.

I'm playing in an adult baseball league this season. It's been just about ten years since I've played hardball, so my goal is to avoid embarrassing myself or my teammates. We had a scrimmage tonight against one of the other teams in our league. The directions to the ball park were along the lines of: Drive north until the highway ends. Follow that road through a few towns. Go past the grain silo, and park on the other side of the street. The air smelled of manure, but we had a baseball diamond, two teams, and an umpire. My first at-bat was in the second inning. We had a runner on, and nobody out. As soon as I walked up to the plate, the umpire sent me back to our dugout because I forgot to put a helmet on. Yeah, that's too many years of slow-pitch softball. Ok, so we'll try again, this time with a helmet on my head. The catcher was kind enough to tell me about a soft spot in the dirt right outside the batters box. If he only knew that I didn't really ...